Question:

I am looking for a very basic beginners guide for how to use Antelope. Does an "Antelope for Dummies" guide exist?

Answer:

The short answer is "No". There are many components to the Antelope software package and every customer has a different use for the software. There are thousands of pages of documentation available in man page format in addition to a few starter guides and full demonstrations of real-time systems (some run with pre-existing data, others using currently available real-time data).

For help getting started the following reading is suggested:

$ANTELOPE/doc/asis/datascope.html
$ANTELOPE/doc/refguides/antelope_refguides.pdf
antelope(1)
antelope(3)
antelopeenv(5)
bugs(1)
dbintro(1)
dbdoc(1)
rt(5)  
rtdemo(1)
rtexec_setup(5)
rtsystem(5)  
rtsetup(8)  
setup.csh(1)

After obtaining your software license, and making sure that you have installed it properly along with sourcing $ANTELOPE/setup.csh in your setup files, you should also try running the GSN demo or one of the other pre-packaged rtdemos:

 % rtdemo gsn

This "demo" is actually a fully functioning real-time system that collects data, runs event detection and association and writes data to disk. It can be used as a template for configuring your own real-time data collection system.